I’m glad I’m not the only one wondering what was up with that.
Also, snopes is not an innocent reference site. Their “debunking” of satire like Babylonbee can cause those sites to be deplatformed.
Also, snopes is not an innocent reference site. Their “debunking” of satire like Babylonbee can cause those sites to be deplatformed.
That's complete nonsense, and not a partisan or "hard-left-only" reaction. The right also tries to de-platform the left, if you're trying to make "fake news" a partisan issue, you're contributing to the problem.
That statement is disturbingly incorrect.
Have you been away from the internet for the last couple of years? There is literally nothing on the internet so fantastical that it won't be posted to social media stripped of context and believed by somebody.
This is not, in anyway, a reasonable filter for bias, let alone one for satire.
Snopes labels things that are false as false. This includes many or most satirical articles. Given the number of times I've told someone that a thing is false and had to provide a scopes link before they would even start to believe me, I'm very grateful for snopes.
Facebook and Google can pound sand.
I used to rely on them, too. That's part of the reason that it pisses me off so much... It used to be a great resource.
Now I use it more to see how a political claim is going to spun, than to check whether it's true.
It only looks like they're being partisan if you cherry-pick your articles.
It's the equivalent of claiming to have a black friend as proof you're not racist.
Are you asserting, then, that the stories about left-wing idiots are true, but the ones about right-wing idiots are false? I'm honestly curious. Are all of the linked Twitter accounts secret false-flag trolls?
Just covering an opposing viewpoint doesn't mean it's covered in a neutral way.
According to their site it's 5 out of 6 presidents, or roughly 80%. Their rating: mostly false. Looks mostly true to me.
1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...
An actual Congressional representative fell for an Onion article titled "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-congressman-falls-vi...
> "I was kind of on the fence in the beginning," says the made-up person, Marcy Kolrath, in the article. "But after a couple of margaritas and a ride down the lazy river they've got circling the place, I got caught up in the vibe. By the time it was over, I almost wished I could've aborted twins and gotten to stay a little longer."
Maybe because a false rating leads to being buried by Google and Facebook. That's a legitimate motive.
Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.
But a lot just turns on being juxtaposed against a prerequisite belief that's not universal. If you don't share that belief, it won't be funny to you. That doesn't (necessarily) make it bad satire.
Perhaps the publication should look inward, not outward, and realize the lines between misinformation and satire are paper thin. Somehow, and perhaps its branding, The Onion manages to maintain humor and absurdity with very little room for interpreting it's content as anything but satire.
There are plenty of people who don't find the onion, at all. It's not a justification for blacklisting them as fake news.
The Onion is, literally, fake news regardless of whether one finds them funny or not. The question is whether people think it's true not whether they think it's funny and that's the only decision being made by a fact-check.
Forum users posted the article from BB asking for it to be debunked. They haven't posted a request for articles from the Onion and that's likely because the Onion is well-known enough for people to know it's satire.
You guys are reaching so hard here.
What line does this walk? Things that are even physically possible and things that are not? I just can't believe Snopes dedicated cycles to debunking this.
Thankfully it got some press and they changed the label to "satire". I can't tell exactly when because the snopes link has been excluded from the way back machine (for whatever reason).
If Facebook and/or Google punish a satire site for having articles marked false by a fact-checker, that's a problem with Facebook and/or Google for responding improperly to fact-check of satire, not a problem with the fact-checker, which is doing exactly their job.
> Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.
It is for a fact checker if what is produced is a honest and accurate fact check of the claims presented. It may not be for the questioner if they are trying to game a system where third parties do dumb things based on what fact checkers do, but that's a problem with the questioner and the third parties, not the fact checker.
If a fact checker can't (or chooses not to) distinguish satire from news, it very much is a problem with the fact checker, regardless of Facebook or Google's over-reliance on them (right or wrong).
At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.
When Snopes does a fact-check of a claim whose original source is satire, they clearly identify both the source and the satirical nature, so whether or not one were to agree with your hypothetical, it doesn't seem applicable to the actual situation being discussed.
> At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.
That's perhaps an argument as to why Snopes should have refused to fact check for Facebook on ethical grounds but, having been employed to do so, it's not a reason they should not have fact checked all claims put before them.
Though social feed including reshares of satirical sources as news is an increasingly important source of “news”, so I’m not sure there's a problem here besides Facebook lacking sufficient AI to distinguish when a story (whether in original presentation or resharing which can alter context and reach less-familiar audiences) is likely to read as news vs. satire by the recipient and only apply any penalty from negative fact check results in the context where it would otherwise be seen as news. This isn't the pre-web (or even pre-social-media) environment where a publication reaches mainly people familiar with it's nature and actively seeking it out, and that's particularly true when the venue is specifically Facebook.
Or a geriatric toddler whose has long since lost his capacity for abstract thinking due to dementia, and would be easily confused by Rudolph Giuliani pedaling ridiculous conspiracy theories that stroke his ego about Russia having nothing to do with interference in the election, if you know who I mean.
They're all things that someone actually thought was real. For example, they quote multiple Twitter users who apparently believed that U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/omar-if-israel-is-so-innoc...
You'll find just as many debunkings of Onion articles, including left-wing satire like "Mike Pence Disappointed God Has Never Asked Him To Kill One Of Own Children". https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mike-pence-laments-no-sacr...
It seems disingenuous to act like Snopes is targeting right-wingers specifically. There are gullible idiots everywhere on the political spectrum.
Edit: Someone is downvote-brigading every post in this thread defending Snopes. I would honestly like to hear what you think is not factual about my comment.